The graphics cards power consumption is always of interest to gaming fans and as the new GPU generations come out, we do our best to respond to this interest in the most extensive manner. So today, time has come for another update on this popular topic.

Testing Methodology

As we have already told you in the previous part of our today’s article, we are currently using a separate test bed for graphics cards power consumption tests and study of graphics card electrical features and characteristics. This testbed has the following hardware and software configuration:

The heart of our testbed is a special measuring board built around Allegro ACS713-30T current diodes and 8-bit Atmel ATmega168 microcontroller:

We have already described its features and design in our article called PC Power Consumption: How Many Watts Do We Need?. Using special software developed specifically for this platform we currently measure all electrical parameters of the tested graphics cards. With this complex testing equipment we can simplify and even automate to some extent the power consumption measuring process. At the time of our today’s tests we used the following available versions of ATI and Nvidia drivers:

ATI Catalyst 10.2 for ATI Radeon HD cards

Nvidia GeForce 196.21 WHQL for Nvidia GeForce cards

As usual, we used the following benchmarks to load the tested graphics accelerators in different modes:

We measured the power consumption for 60 seconds in each mode except maximum load simulation in OCCT. To avoid graphics card failure caused by overclocking of electrical circuits during OCCT: GPU test we limited the measuring interval with 10 seconds.